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Description

The Fungal Community: Its Organization and Role in the Ecosystem, Third Edition addresses many of the questions related to the observations, characterizations, and functional attributes of fungal assemblages and their interaction with the environment and other organisms. This edition promotes awareness of the functional methods of classification over taxonomic methods, and approaches the concept of fungal communities from an ecological perspective, rather than from a fungicentric view. It has expanded to examine issues of global and local biodiversity, the problems associated with exotic species, and the debate concerning diversity and function.

The third edition also focuses on current ecological discussions - diversity and function, scaling issues, disturbance, and invasive species - from a fungal perspective. In order to address these concepts, the book examines the appropriate techniques to identify fungi, calculate their abundance, determine their associations among themselves and other organisms, and measure their individual and community function. This book explains attempts to scale these measures from the microscopic cell level through local, landscape, and ecosystem levels. The totality of the ideas, methods, and results presented by the contributing authors points to the future direction of mycology.

Reviews

"…a number of chapters provide excellent summaries of the modern methods available for studying fungal ecology, along with those more traditional methods that are still extremely valuable…overall it is a hugely valuable compendium of fungal ecology research. It is a must for the library shelf, and at its reasonable price I highly recommend it for purchase by any researcher with an interest in fungi and the environment."

-Lynne Boddy, Cardi University, UK, Mycological Research, 2006

"These 44 chapters are an excellent starting point for anyone interested in fungal communities, in the broadest sense of the term. It is a book for dipping into…may be the last comprehensive treatment of fungal communities before the molecular revolution."

-Meriel Jones, University of Liverpool, UK, Microbiology Today

"… the scope of the work is tremendous. The editors have done an admirable job of assembling authors whose combined writings convey current ideas in fungal ecology while still managing to introduce mycologists and ecologists to the concepts and historical context of each others’ work. Excellent chapters providing overviews of methods … provide a snap shot of the current approaches used to understand fungal communities at several levels of organization. This book should probably be on the shelf of every student of mycology, and many ecologists too. For all students, this book should be a valuable resource and source of inspiration."

"Thorough taxonomic and subject indices further aid the reader in navigating through multiple authors’ treatments of subjects of interest. Well provisioned bibliographies are another useful addition. … this book would be a handy reference for researchers … ."